Bringing Children and Books Together…

That is what the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) strives to do. They are an international organization with national chapters in numerous countries. Recently IBBY Pakistan launched a campaign to promote reading amongst children in Pakistan. They wanted to design very unusual, colorful and attractive posters that would bring children closer to books.

I was lucky to have the opportunity to design this set of five posters. They needed to be out of the ordinary and so I used altered art techniques.

Pakistan has a national language and many local dialects. I got old pages from books in all the dialects I could manage and did and background of those. Added a color wash, or what I like to call my rainbow color wash, and then set to work with this background.

The Alif Laila which is IBBY Pakistan has produces a lot of children’s books and so I took the characters out of those books to make a collage on all five posters. Since our target audience was children they had to feature in the posters and so we had a photography session with some incredibly cute kids, the expressions in their pictures came out so alive and excited that I feel they set the mood for each and every poster.

This campaign was an immense success and I will share with you the pictures taken of these posters while they were disseminated all over Pakistan. It was really nice to see people exclaiming over the techniques used in the posters and saying that these were like nothing they had seen before…Altered Art rocks! =)